


5 reasons why Ivan didn't get plastic surgery to fix his scars

by vtn



Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: 5 Things, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-01
Updated: 2010-07-01
Packaged: 2017-11-17 09:19:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/550020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vtn/pseuds/vtn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why Ivan Vanko wears his scars proudly now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	5 reasons why Ivan didn't get plastic surgery to fix his scars

**1\. Sometimes he couldn't.** It isn't really an option when you're deep in a filthy Russian prison, fighting for your place in some twisted hierarchy. When the people who keep you barely alive have little money to spend and less sympathy.

 **2\. Sometimes, even surgery leaves scars.** Even when he could afford it, could afford anything he wanted through Bratva connections, some scars ran too deep, sometimes leaving clefts in his skin, sometimes burning into his memory so even if he couldn't see them, they were there.

 **3\. Besides, he didn't want to.** His scars map the course of his history, of the deaths he's avoided and the ones he's caused. They shape him, give him life, like the Hebrew characters and the mystic math on the earthen skin of a golem. Without them, he wouldn't know who he was anymore.

 **4\. They made his father angry.** Ivan loves his father but sometimes he doesn't understand: sometimes he saw happy, smiling children walking through Moscow with their school groups or their tourist families, saw their freshly washed hair and fingernails, knew they were going home to somewhere warm and safe. And so one day when he came home with the skin under his eye slit and his mouth a black wet gash, missing teeth, and his father cried "Ivan, you've ruined your beautiful face," Ivan smiled then, laughed, even as blood spilled out from between his lips, and said "No. _You_ did."

 **5\. Tony Stark did.** It isn't like Stark didn't get into fights himself, didn't end up with the kind of injuries that leave lasting marks. But _his_ life was different. _His_ plastic surgeons were interviewed in the press clippings that pile up on Ivan's walls and in his file cabinets. And even as Ivan establishes mob connections, even as people start to come for him for his knowledge and his skills—when he could easily have his scars removed, have his own skin made rosy and washed anew, there is one thing he believes in, one thing that kept him going in the bleakest hours of his early life and of his prison time: he will never—must never—be like Tony Stark.


End file.
